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The purpose of this clinical exemplar was to look back and reflect on a clinical experience that really stood out to us so far from our nursing school practice. This exemplar is used to tell the reader about the experience I had with a patient that despite things not going their way, showed extreme resilience throughout their entire stay. This resilience is what really inspired me to write about this patient as it was truly unlike anything that I have seen in another patient before. I will use this exemplar as a tool to help to further grow my nursing education as I continue my career in the profession.

clinical exemplar

After the completion of both the practice A and B comprehensive I was not thrilled with the result of my proctored exam. I think there was a few reasons that it didn’t go as well as some of my other proctored exams. Going into the exam I was already very overwhelmed with the amount of other ATI remediations that were due in the next coming days and with the proctored assessment being as long as it was didn’t help with my test anxiety. I knew that there was a good possibility that I was going to have to do a lot more remediations for this one assessment than I typically would for some of the others. This did not help when it came to actually taking the assessment and caused me to overthink all of my answers and change a lot of them before going to the next one. However, I am going to take this experience as a learning opportunity to try to improve on my test taking strategies for the actual NCLEX and hopefully be able to improve on this performance.

Over the course of this semester, my ideas toward gerontology had changed greatly. Going into the course I kind of thought that what we had been learning about for the last year and a half already had an emphasis on how to properly take care of the older population. After finishing up this course it showed me that there was much more to it than what I had initially thought. Going forward I will really be able to apply what we have learned about the older population and make sure to give them the best care possible.

            One insight from this course that really resonated with me was the idea of taught helplessness. This concept not only applies to caring for an older population in a clinical setting, but it also can apply outside of that. It is important to make sure that the person that you may be caring for still should try to do as much as they can in their care. Doing everything for them like washing or other ADLs the client will soon think that they are uncapable of doing them for themselves. Which in most cases is not the case and they are more than capable of doing so.

            A second insight that I will take away from this course is to really do a thorough medication reconciliation. We have spent a lot of time talking about all of the different effects that medications can have on an older adult and the importance of looking to see if all the drugs are really necessary. Doing a good medication reconciliation helps to really take a deep dive into the client’s medications and really look to see if these medications are still actually doing the intended job that they were supposed to do or is there another form of treatment for this issue. the medication reconciliation can also show that there may be an interaction that could be causing a need for another medication, which can lead to other issues for an older client. This can mean that taking away one medication can eliminate the need for other medications, all thanks to simply doing a medication reconciliation.

Following taking the practice A comprehensive exam, I took the test strategies to heart and made sure to use some of the same ones. Again, I made sure that I had given myself plenty of time to get them assessment done and not have to rush through it. If I found myself losing concentration or that my mind was wondering I made sure to take a step back and take a break. This could’ve been a quick break or go grab a snack, anything that would allow me to clear my mind and get ready to sit back down and focus. As well as making sure that I gave myself enough time to really stay focus I made sure that I was in a quiet environment that didn’t give me too many distractions and allow me to stay focused.

Following the practice A comprehensive exam, I was pleased with the overall outcome. I was able to receive a grade that I was unexpecting to get and I think it was because of the way I took the exam. With it being so long I made sure to leave a good chunk of my day to do the assessment. Whenever I felt that my concentration was starting to fade I would utilize the pause button and make sure that I took a break and just took a step back to make sure that I wasn’t losing focus. I think this really helped instead of just trying to get through it all at once and almost rushing through it all. As I did with my other practice exams I made sure to really find a quiet place free from distractions that would allow me to focus on the task at hand and really go through all of the questions.

After completing this course and all of the work preparing us for our licensure, I feel that we were properly prepared. Using the individual reports from all of the practice ATIs I was able to identify some test strategies that helped me to improve my scores as the semester went on. The thing that I found really worked well for me was making sure that I set aside an allotted amount of time to really be able make sure that I was focused and not rushing to finish the practice test. Another strategy that I found to really help was finding a quiet area where I wouldn’t get distracted by other people or other things. This again really helped me to focus and get things done. When I identified any content gaps from the practice exams, I made sure that I completed the remediations thoroughly to really help to learn the material again. To complete these remediations I made sure to use all the resources I had available. These included the ATI eBook and the books from our previous courses that we have already taken. I felt that going back and looking at the material as well as reading what the ATI book had to say really reinforced what information was needed. I will be able to use the preparation that we had from this course and really take into consideration what has worked well for me and what hasn’t worked well for me. When it comes to preparing to get my licensure I know I will need to be able to find a quiet area with very little distractions too really be able to focus on studying. Using the remediations they helped to identify the areas that I should focus my attention on the most and will be able to use them as a study tool. All of the skills that we have acquired throughout the class will help us greatly in preparing to transition into our professional practice.

This CAT exam was more difficult than I was expecting it to be. Some of the material that was covered on the exam I felt we may have not fully covered in class yet or it was material that we didn’t go into as much detail as the ATI had anticipated. I did think that most of the questions that I answered correctly I truly did know from the material in class and some of our other assignments. Towards the end I did feel myself wanting to just get the exam done with so I think that it affected how much focus I had had. It did help me prepare to be ready for taking a longer exam than we typically are used to much like the NCLEX will be.

The proctored pharm exam did not go as well as I was hoping for. I thought that I was going to be able to remember a lot of the questions from both the practice A&B but when it came to taking the exam a lot of what I remembered went out the door. I think that it was partially due to the fact that it was after one of our adult health IV exams, so I was more focused on preparing for that. I also don’t think that waiting around for a few hours in between the classes made me over think the proctored exam.

After taking the practice A assessment overall, I wasn’t very surprised with the score that I got. Despite thinking that pharm is one of my weaker points I felt that when I was answering the questions, I thought that I could easily distinguish which ones were the correct answers versus the incorrect ones. For the ones that I did not know the answer to I thought that I was able to make a very educated guess at which answers were definitely not the answer and was able to make an educated guess at what the correct answer might have been. I think that taking practice A will help to prepare me for the practice B assessment and the proctored assignment